Shift-left testing is an approach to software development that involves moving the testing phase earlier in the development life cycle, allowing teams to identify and resolve bugs more quickly. This approach has several advantages, including identifying and resolving more bugs before they reach production, automating more of existing continuous integration and delivery workflows, and sharing ownership of testing responsibilities among team members. However, it requires substantial changes to existing processes and can be difficult to implement without adding overhead. To overcome these challenges, teams can adopt best practices such as enabling developers to test their code, optimizing test environments for efficient pipelines, designing pipelines to fail fast and provide actionable feedback, and monitoring pipeline performance. Datadog supports shift-left testing with features that enable running tests directly from CI/CD pipelines, monitoring CI pipelines and tests, and creating good feedback channels across teams. By adopting these best practices and leveraging tools like Datadog, teams can improve the quality of their applications and release new features to customers faster.